I went down the stairs and out the front door. Susan and Ellen were in the office talking. I didn't say anything to them. I walked out the door and turned right.

What did you do then?

I walked to the corner. I thought about going straight down as usual, but instead crossed the street. I began walking up a slight hill to the Brown Quadrangle. I passed two people as I turned into the Quadrangle. I took a diagonal left, which would leave me out between two libraries.

Wait, I remember crossing the first intersection. I think there was little or no traffic.

After writing my slightly hysterical airport/journey post the other day I checked mail and came across this piece by Alan Sondheim titled Memory of a Walk, quoted above. I don't know Alan's work that well, largely from his postings on Nettime some of which have been amazing. I really loved the blankness and calm of this recent piece -  mundane and enigmatic at the same time.

*

Had mail from Neil Bennun following brief previous entries here on Fénéon, the three line novel and newspaper sign-boards. Neil sent a bunch of images from his collection of newspaper sign-board pictures, including the one above. Writing to him reminded me of the book Suitcase Body Is Missing Woman by Eva Weinmayr (Bookworks, 2005) which presents a fantastic archive of Evening Standard newsstand posters arranged in alphabetical sequence. 

About to enter 10 hours of questions and answers about art in The Frequently Asked. Thinking of this Henri Bergson quote from the performance/lecture by Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish last night

"Chaos is just the structure you weren't expecting to see."

And of this exchange I heard the other morning, two friends discussing a potential colleague:

Y: Is she disorganised?

X: Let's just put it this way; she is not in full control of the detail.

Y: [sceptically] What else is there?

*

Vlatka has a great story here at 1001 Nights Cast, the first time she has written for the project.

This, about Peter Higgs and hopes that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will finally find the Higgs particle and with it help figure out the origins of mass, when it starts to smash protons into each other next year. There's something fascinating to me about the view from now back onto 1960's science (be it computing, genetics or quantum) - the myth-making attention on the characters, their relations/rivalries/or lack thereof, the framework myth of science as a 'gentleman's game', the universities and research almost-before corporations, the present view on almost-amateurism and 'early days' in those fields that now seem long-established, institutionalised, utterly central. Also, I love those narratives, like this one - about a thing 'proved' first as pure theory but which then waits decades in hope that instruments or experiments will back it up as observed reality. Of his long wait for a confirmation of his theory Higgs, now 78 said "I have to ask my GP to keep me alive". I'm trying to figure out the possible relationships between that methodology (a theory waiting for proof) and art practice which so often (for me at least) starts by doing - action (words on paper or on screen, fooling around in the studio, arsing about with the video camera) first, and which then has to wait for a theory.

Also this (via my friend the artist Graham Parker) from earlier in the year, about Microsoft Research teaming up with biomedical researchers in Seattle, Boston and Perth, Australia, to see if anti-spam computer techniques can also be used to help design an AIDS vaccine. Something gripping about this idea too, not least because of the material/linguistic aspect - research founded on a pervasive (but-in-the-end-arbitrary) instance of metaphor.

Finally this - more mythological territory in science - about reconstruction of the Collosus code-breaking computers at Bletchley Park.

In which the day is fragmented entirely from dawn to dusk, to the point where nothing can be done with any of it. The dazed twenty minutes at home after waking and before leaving the house, the fifteen minutes walking to and then waiting for the bus, the ten minutes on the bus, then fifteen minutes waiting for the train. The journey itself - a bare hour of stopping-sevice, interrupted by two ticket inspections, plus your constant moving up and down so that other people can get on/off and in any case distracted by the fact that train is way too crowded, you're hardly awake. Eventual arrival at an airport, the ten minute walk thru the terminal to check-in, the ten minute wait in line at check-in machine and then another fifteen at bag drop, the five minute walk to passport control and security, the further and much longer wait there, the more-or-less eventual 'arrival' at the top of the snaking security line, the depressing removal of objects from pockets and laptop from bag, the taking off of shoes and the transportation of all these things thru the magic security portal, the five minutes spent relocating all these bits and putting them back in the places where they were before. The walk towards the gates. Various pointless bits of extra or recreational waiting - to get a coffee, to buy some sticking-plasters, to buy something to read - then some pointless hanging around looking for wifi, and then waiting around for the gate to be announced, then a walk to the gate, a sit down and then a trip to the toilet and then some further pointless waiting stood in a line at the gate itself, in order to gain entry to the plane (higher seat numbers boarding first), and then - the non-surprise surprise - some further waiting just below the gate, now on a large grey bus into which everyone is packed, followed by its circuitous and slow driving to the plane itself, lumbering through fog or rain or brilliant sunshine or whatever's on offer that day, then further waiting on the tarmac stood in line to file up the temporary steps and onto the plane, stowing your stuff, seating, belting, waiting for the safety demonstration, the taxi and take off. And on and on and on and on and on, and all in small chunks of utterly useless time, thru a long and endlessly fractured wait for a plane change in some other city, the entire boarding and disembacation procedure repeated, eventual arrival and a taxi ride in the darkness of an invisible city to a hotel whose name you have forgotten as soon as you've checked in.

I don't think I can do justice to it though, really. To the deadening core of it; the days' hours passing in dried, sliced and dried form, each chunk of time you earn too small to do anything with - a distracted conversation by mobile phone, three snatched and unfocused pages of the book you were trying to read, two paragraphs of an email before the seatbelt light comes on and you have to shut-down. At a certain point - perhaps as the aeroplane dawdles with violent aimlessness around the runways in Frankfurt to the sound of its muzak ballads and banshee funereal jet-engines, you even try 'thinking', hoping to at least cross some mental 'to-be-dones' off your list in this cramped, ponderous no-mans land. But even the thinking stalls, looping round, as you're waiting for the announcements to finish or as you're waiting for the baggage to crawl round in circles towards you on the slow-motion conveyor belt thing, your whole psyche sinking systematically through the day, down towards a nirvana of florescent-lit half-sleep, locked in your own skull and falling, in an eternal fucking delirium of motion stasis.